Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama's health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide....

The Doctor Patient Medical Association (DPMA) ... is a member of the National Tea Party Federation....

The DPMA is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). DPMA Chair and Co-Founder, Kathryn Serkes, is on ALEC's Health and Human Services Task Force....

So this is a blatantly partisan survey. What's more, it's a fairly old blatantly partisan survey -- Townhall and RedState cited the results on June 14.

This is what the right does -- it's all the right does. The propaganda is generated. It's disseminated. And then maybe it's disseminated again, on a particular day, through a particular channel (Drudge is always good, and the Monday after a holiday week is good, too) -- fake news re-released as even faker news, because it isn't even new.

Nobody on the right, at least at the national level, seriously cares about proper national governance, even as conservatives would define that -- all right-wingers do is devise and execute new ways of winning. They want to win the propaganda war; they want to win votes; they want to win the opportunity to improve the material comfort of those who are already extremely materially comfortable. They don't want anything else. They don't want to govern. They're not patriots.

The key statistic being cited here is so absurdly skewed that even the wingers who cooked up the survey can't seriously expect it to be cited by the mainstream press. Clearly the plan is for the number to be so memorable to the credulous that it will show up in small-town letters to the editor (here you go) and now make its way onto talk radio and Fox and right-wing blogs. From there it will become gospel truth, posted on thousands of message boards, memorized by rank-and-file wingers and thrown in the faces of liberals and swing voters. Such a high number! And so specific! It must be true, right?

14 comments:

‘“…a nonpartisan association of doctors and patients dedicated to preserving free choice in medicine. The organization is a member of the National Tea Party Federation and the “American Grassroots Coalition.”’

“Nonpartisan?”Associated with National Tea Party Federation and the American Grassroots Coalition – and it’s “nonpartisan.”

WOW!Whodathunk it: NONPARTISAN!Nope, not a trace of partisanship. Why would anyone ask?

And, of course, the MSM will dutifully report these doctors as nonpartisan.And people will think, “WHOA! 83%?!!!!!”

And not one of these doctors will ever actually quit, of course – they ain’t stupid – they’re “nonpartisan.”They are Conservatives who like the status quo and their income, and want Obama and the Democrats to lose – so they’ll say anything to help make that happen.

And this 83% is a number – so it’s a stat – and the MSM always looks for stats to back-up Conservative bullsh*t. They loves them some o’ them Conservative stats!

Democratic ones? Eh, not so much. To many numbers, too many explanations for them.But 83% of doctors surveyed? That’s nice and simple.

I wonder if, in another survey, these same doctors would recommend leeches for bleeding amemic patients – or those suffering gaping wounds from chainsaw accidents?

The hilarious part of this is the degree of credulity it would take to believe that even 25% of practicing doctors would consider "quitting" over anything. For one thing, most of them aren't fit to do anything else. For another, when's the last time you saw a practicing doctor driving a 2nd-hand Chevy? Nope, the status and money are far too good for "quitting" over politics, & neither will decline appreciably no matter what healthcare plan the US has or doesn't have.

Holy shit, did anyone click through to the actual report from the DPMA?

They sent out faxes to 36,000 doctors, of which 16,227 were actually delivered and they got 669 replies. So, they got a 4.3% response rate on their survey. And instead of concluding that only the absolutely most pissed-off and motivated people bothered to reply to their fax spam, they're claiming that the results are representative of all doctors nationwide. Sure, that's credible.

This is uninformative on a number of levels. First, it's not 83% of doctors surveyed, it's 83% of the less than five percent who were cranky enough to bother to respond to this spam push-poll of loaded questions designed for no other purpose than to create a false impression.

So indeed is the question what they're actually responding to-- the actual survey says that 83% of doctors are thinking about quitting, but not about why.

Fed up with fucking surveys from spammers, I'd guess, it'd be enough to drive me out of business.

"At a speech earlier today [July 16, 2012] in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Obama cited economic analysis conducted by one of his campaign donors, Kimberly Clausing, and called her a "non-partisan economist." Clausing, a college professor from Reed College, has donated to President Obama and several Democratic politicians and causes over the last dozen years."